Popular Cholesterol Pills Now Made of Broken Glass

A generic
version of the widely-used Liptor anti-cholesterol drug is
being recalled because the pills are full of “glass particles,”
which we guess is a bad thing? People take so many pills!

And you know how the generics are always a lot cheaper, and who
cares because it’s not like the brand of the medicine is something
you care about? Well, one reason these particular pills are cheaper
is because they come from some sketchy factory in India—far away
from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which does a pretty
lousy job of protecting the food and medicine supply right here in
the United States. For instance, one of the worst recent cases was
an incredibly disgusting and filthy Children’s Tylenol factory
where
“undocumented bacteria was living in the vats of drug
ingredients” in Philadelphia.

Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals Inc. has recalled dozens of lots of its
generic version of cholesterol drug Lipitor because some may
contain tiny glass particles, the latest in a string of
manufacturing deficiencies that once led U.S. regulators to bar
imports of the Indian company’s medicines.

Americans take so many prescription drugs. It is kind of amazing
that we, as a people, can live for nearly a hundred years on a diet
of Costco ribs and 2-liter bottles of corn syrup, all because we
ingest a staggering amount of pills from the age of 28 or so until
we are finally dead, seven decades later. For example, most
Americans are high on “synthetic heroin,” right now.

Americans make up less than 5% of the global population but
consume 80% of the world’s supply of opioid prescription pills.
Sales of the drugs have increased more than fourfold in the past 10
years, grossing $11 billion annually. To express that figure more
personally, in 2010 enough [opioid pills] were handed out by
doctors to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of
hydrocodone, a pure opioid as powerful as morphine, every four
hours for a month.

Is this the “prescription drug benefit” people like John McCain
always talk about, when they briefly pop up from a mid-morning nod
out?